The Native Media and IIN: Not Cut from the Same Cloth

13.9.08

Editor's Note: This is in response to a reader who submitted a comment in response to "OK Sarah, Can We Talk" by Kevin Abourezk
The original IIN post can be found here.
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The Native Media and IIN: Not Cut from the Same Cloth

- The Angryindian

Occasionally readers take offence to something I write here in IIN and readers are of course entitled to their opinions, but I take issue with the suggestion that I did not comprehend the obvious "satire" within a recent article by Kevin Abourezk entitled “OK Sarah, We Need to Talk”. I read his work regularly and I clearly see things differently than the reader who thinks I just don’t get it.

First, before readers write something like this to me, take into consideration the stated editorial perspective of this newsblog as opposed to the “mainstream” Indian news agencies that publish Mr. Abourezk. The task of the Inteligentaindigena Novajoservo newsblog is to inform activist Aboriginal peoples and our supporters around the world on the issues and causes that effect our communities and our lives. We reject the colonial states that claim ownership over us and our ancestral territories and we struggle in various ethical ways to maintain our survival with the clear intention of regaining our human right to cultural and territorial independence. If the publications Mr. Abourezk pens for are of a similar political bent, I am unaware of it. Unlike this site, they seem to be working towards a goal of inclusion within the very same socio-political system that oppresses Indigenous people here in the U.S. as well as our brothers and sisters across the planet.

This is not an attack on Mr. Abourezk personally in spite of the harsh tone of the title. I am merely pointing out that Mr. Abourezk is no different than most other "accepted" Native journalists in that they persist in pretending that they have a seat at the White man's table or at least, his press office. Obviously I take issue with that view and strongly so. We were never meant to be a part of the colonial system and I find it embarrassing that those who are chosen to represent us do not have the courage to speak about this in real, coherent and tangible terms. Instead, we talk of what it like for Indians to be a part of the DNC and RNC conventions and who got to speak before large crowds and which “tribe” will adopt a candidate who in the end will do absolutely nothing for our people but keep us in our respective place at the bottom of the U.S. totem pole. And we ask ourselves why we get so little respect.

This “satirical” editorial in my humble Afro-Indio Indigenist opinion was at best a journalistic hand-up to Alaska's Gov. Palin as a misunderstood and besieged fragile mother of five trying to hold it together to become the first female U.S. VP. At worst, it plays absurdly into the notion that Gov. Sarah Palin gives a damn about Indian people at all when it seems clear that she does not. It’s written defensively and it will be received this way. That is how I feel 88.8% of the Native Internet reading population that even reads RezNet or Indianz.com will take away from it. Why? Because that is what’s happening across the board in reaction to the revelation that Gov. Sarah Palin is not at all what the GOP wants us to believe.

If you doubt what I am saying, see the supposedly "satirical" magazine cover of Barack and Michelle Obama by New Yorker illustrator Barry Blitt, (July 21, 2008) and the fuss and confusion that it caused and continues to generate. White folks all over the country, many of which had never even heard of the New Yorker before this, found proof of what they were looking for. The right-wing talking points floating throughout the mainstream colonialist media were validated by the visual impact of that cover. And no one really believes that the cover was intended as pure satire, especially since the publisher of the New Yorker was present at the Republican Convention (as reported by Air America's Sam Seder). They knew exactly what sort of effect it would have on the perception of Mr. Obama and by extension, all dark people before the election.

I see the "Palin Letter" in the same vein. If Mr. Abourezk intended to provoke thought and discourse on the issue of this anti-Indian Creationist war-monger from Alaska then good on him for that, but this was not the way to do it. Ms. Palin's stock has actually risen several more points in the wake of the general public’s knee-jerk response to the RNC's arrogant insistence that the dreaded liberals are attacking their candidate unfairly. And here comes this piece rolling in the same vein, albeit unintentionally, on the heels of two recent articles by the same author focused on how Indian republicans have their own noble struggle against good for nothing democrats, ( The Minutest Minority: Don't Count Out Native Republicans / Yes, Native Republicans Exist). The timing is interesting to me. And why do in this fashion instead of simply calling Gov. Palin out on her documented anti-Indian racism and policies in spite of her husband’s reported ethnicity?

*This is exactly why Barack Obama has already lost this election. He has yet to speak forcefully on his own behalf in the face of purely racist and surely underhanded politik from the GOP. Now, after everything else, they are falsely accusing him of sexism towards Gov. Sarah Palin. Yet her dubious connections to Jew-hating evagelicals, her questionable political experience and the embarrassing revelation of her hypocritical family values have not been paraded as negatives by the media. Mr. Obama on the otehr hand has turned his back on Black America in pursuit of the White House. He is treated like a token because he carries himself like a token. At this point in the game, even the staunchest White racist democrats are demanding that Obama defend himself. The Angry Black Male be damnned. Even they see that we just can't take four more years of Pax Americana.

And here is something else I feel that everybody who reads IIN and IIR should understand. This newsblog is unabashedly pro-Aboriginal or more accurately termed, Indigenist. Consider us for all intents and purposes an Aboriginal version of European Zionist Jews without the genocide, racism or violence they have used to achieve their nationalistic goals. I believe in studying from those that are successful in achieving a situation that works to define and defend their people’s human rights. While I despise the State of Israel and their uprooting and murderous genocide of the Indigenous Palestinian population, the original ideological framework for their right as a people to exist must be admired.

They too were once victims of European invasion and dispersion, now they are tools of European colonialism in Western Asia in return for a land of their own. And no Jew, anywhere in world, even if they hate and oppose the racist, political entity of the Israeli state, would allow anyone to demean Israel’s right to exist to any degree. And for most Jews, nearly everything said about the State of Israel or any individual Jew can and will be considered a threat to Jewish existence everywhere. And for good reason, they know that the White world hates them and has taught others to hate them for centuries. After Hitler, how could anyone blame them? And worse, while Auschwitz and other such sites burned, the rest of the world watched and said “good riddance”. Hence, Zionism.

Aboriginal people need to get with the programme in the United States. Our people in Occupied Canada and Occupied Mexico already know the score and unlike us, actually stand on their rights and walk and talk openly as a people about what is really going on in the Americas and to whom. As brother Malcolm X told us years ago, “The White man knows what independence means…what do you think he will do to you once you understand what it means?”

We have forgotten what it means. I know this because Indians join the military to fight on behalf of the White man to force the U.S. marketplace onto other Indigenous peoples who reject it. We are helping them do what was done to us. We seek inclusion with this system rather than freedom as Indian people. And when some of us speak to this we are told to be quiet, to be “real Indians” and fly the American flag. This is why I think that it is important to understand that Indigenous peoples are the only populations in the world that proudly fly the flag of their oppressors. And Native journalists that side-step these issues do little to advance this perspective. An Indigenist perspective.

There have been sporadic actions by Red Power movements but they have never received ample and committed support from the Native establishment nor the Indian media. This is another question that could and should be raised by Native journalists but for some queer reason almost never see the light of day. It isn’t considered to be polite to question the occupier. When Russell Means and some other angry-Indians stood up and claimed sovereignty for their people under international law and U.S. treaty, the Native American “press” laughed along with the White establishment media. Could you imagine the Jerusalem Post behaving this way under the very same circumstances? We have yet to learn this lesson from our Hebrew brethren. Unity is golden. We too have a right to exist and a responsibility to point out those actions in political circles that threaten our existence.

If Mr. Abourezk composed an article that assertively yet honestly pointed to Gov. Palin as the serious threat to Indian America she really is my response to his editorial would have been radically different. It was overtly geared in my opinion to appeal, not to challenge a dangerous anti-Aboriginal theological radical running for the White Man’s House that has a problem with Indians she isn’t married to.

Mr. Abourezk has been around long enough to know that his piece was going to be accepted by the gullible as it was written. If Mr. Abourezk is at all serious about speaking truth to Indigenous realities and liberation, he should ask why Indians are voting at all when our own treaties with the U.S. colonial state are ignored and our people still face institutional poverty, racism and genocide. The Indian sterilization programmes run by the BIA would be a good place for Mr. Abourezk to start. So would brother Leonard Peltier’s case which should be on the list of questions every Native journalist should raise when discussing American politics. These issues are missing from the discourse in the colonialist media and the Indian media does not press hard enough to make these stories heard. Documenting how we are still begging the White man to be allowed in the house he built on top of our world has gotten us as a people nowhere.

After 1776 we still have no real rights, we are not in any real control of any of our lands and we are still routinely disrespected by the colonial population. When Native journalists start talking about these and other Indigenous issues with the tone and tremor of the Zionist lobby the White man may not want to read it, but he will have to deal with it. Let’s see where that takes the discourse in the mainstream instead of doing the McCain-Palin ticket a favour by cementing their case for personality-over-issues in Indian Country.

Labels: editorial, Indigenous peoples of the Americas, New Yorker